Category: Academic related

This page provides some excerpts from some of my favorite books and some online materials about how to improve writing and write well — write concisely and clearly.

Writing is a game of language, meaning, and connection — it is a high level communication between a writer and his/her readers on paper or on computer screens.

Reading is a game of understanding, conversation, and questioning —  it is the conversation between you (the reader) and your writer.

Easy writing makes hard reading.

—Ernest Hemingway

Note: so hard writing makes easy reading.

I love smooth words, like gold-enameled fish
Which circle slowly with a silken swish.

—Elinor Wylie

 

=====Some excerpts from books about writing======

• The Elements of Style (4th Edition) (by William Strunk Jr. and E. B. White) – the books’s wiki intro page

An excerpt from the book (the emphasis is mine, the same for all excerpts below), “Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short, or that he avoid all detail and treat his subjects only in outline, but that he make every word tell.”

Old version of the book can be found online: William Strunk, Jr., The Elements of Style.

The Elements of Style (Audio version freely available on LibriVox , now you can read by your ears by free of charge:). By the way, you can download the audio .mp3 files — — HERE you can download the Whole book (zip file) if its not retrievable on LibriVox website.)

 

• Writing Tools: 55 Essential Strategies for Every Writer (by Roy Peter Clark)

“Writing is a craft you can learn,” says Roy Peter Clark. “You need tools, not rules.” 

An excerpt from the tool 21:

In “Why I write,” George Orwell explains that “good prose is like a window pane.“
The best work calls the reader’s attention to the world being described, not to the writer’s flourishes.
When we peer out a window onto the horizon, we don’t notice the pane, yet the pane frames our vision just as the writer frames our view of the story.

An excerpt from tool 13 (Play with words):

“Just as a sculptor works with clay, a writer shapes a world with words.”

 

• On Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction (by William Zinsser)

Review about the book: On Writing Well has been praised for its sound advice, its clarity and the warmth of its style. It is a book for everybody who wants to learn how to write or who needs to do some writing to get through the day, as almost everybody does in the age of e-mail and the Internet. (check more reviews about this book here.)

Some excerpts from the book:

• A Writer’s Decisions (pp 261 – 262) on the edition I bought (30th anniversary edition):

‘This has been a book about decisions — the countless successive decisions that go into every act of writing. Some of the decisions are big (“What should I write about?”) and some are as small as the smallest word. But all of them are important.’

‘Learning how to organize a long article is just as important as learning how to write a clear and pleasing sentence. All your clear and pleasing sentences will fall apart if you don’t keep remembering that writing is linear and sequential, that logic is the glue that holds it together, that tension must be maintained from one sentence to the next and from one paragraph to the next and from one section to the next, and that narrative – good old-fashioned storytelling – is what should pull your readers along without their noticing the tug. The only thing they should notice is that you have made a sensible plan for your journey. Every step should seem inevitable.’

• Clutter
  Fighting clutter is like fighting weeds — the writer is always slightly behind.

New varieties sprout overnight, and by noon they are part of American speech.
Consider what President Nixon’s aide John Dean accomplished in just one day of testimony on television during the Watergate hearings. The next day
everyone in America was saying “at this point in time” instead of “now.”

 Examine every word you put on paper. You’ll find a surprising number that don’t serve any purpose.

“It is raining”. There is no need to say, “At the present time we are experiencing precipitation.”
I laughed out loud when I saw this.

“Experiencing” is one of the worst clutterers. Even your dentist will ask if you are experiencing any pain. If he had his own kid in the chair he would say, “Does it hurt?” He would, in short, be himself.

• Definition of a careful writer  (pp 302 – 303) on the edition I bought (30th anniversary edition):

‘My favorite definition of a careful writer comes from Joe DiMaggio, though he did not know that’s what he was defining. Dimaggio was the greatest player I ever saw, and nobody looked more relaxed. He covered vast distances in the outfield, moving in graceful strides, always arriving ahead of the ball, making the hardest catch look routine, and even when he was at bat, hitting the ball with tremendous power, he didn’t appear to be exerting himself. I marveled at how effortless he looked because what he did could only be achieved by great daily effort. A reporter once asked him how he managed to play so well so consistently, and he said:‘‘ I always thought that there was at least one person in the stands who had never seen me play, and I didn’t want to let him down.’’’

 

• Fish, S. E. (2011). How to write a sentence. HarperCollins. (PDF)

This is a very good book, very inspiring.

Praise for the book:

TOC

One of my favorite parts from the book (see the two pics below):

 

See below for some more excerpts from the book (the emphasis is mine):

“But, in fact, sentences promise more. They promise nothing less than lessons and practice in the organization of the world. That is what language does: organize the world into manageable, and in some sense artificial, units that can then be inhabited and manipulated. If you can write a sentence in which actors, actions, and objects are related to one another in time, space, mood, desires, fears, causes, and effects, and if your specification of those relationships is delineated with a precision that communicates itself to your intended reader, you can, by extrapolation and expansion, write anything: a paragraph, an argument, an essay, a treatise, a novel. ”

 

 

• How to Write Short: Word Craft for Fast Times (by Roy Peter Clark)

“In the digital age, short writing is king. We need more good short writing — the kind that makes us stop, read, and think.”

“Simplify, but not at the risk of clarity and comprehensibility.”

“Keep it short, but not so short that it creates ambiguity.”

“Understand your audience.” “A good writer is a good explainer. With knowledge of readers and their needs, the writer translates jargon, builds definitions based on what is already known, and leads an audience to greater clarity and new knowledge.”

 

• Metaphors We Live By (by George Lakoff, and Mark Johnson)

“The essence of metaphor is understanding and experience one kind of thing in terms of another.”

This book is not categorized under writing guide, but believe it or not, our writing can be improved or at least it will have an impact on our writing after reading it. This book highlights so many issues in language. It is not like a style manual or how-to-write book, but what makes a difference is: in the context of metaphor(s), the subtle implications of a sentence and the inferences that readers might make from its construction.

Metaphor, the authors explain, is a fundamental mechanism of mind, one that allows us to use what we know about our physical and social experience to provide understanding of countless other subjects. Because such metaphors structure our most basic understandings of our experience, they are “metaphors we live by”—metaphors that can shape our perceptions and actions without our ever noticing them.

In this book, Lakoff and Johnson not only discussed how we use metaphorical language absentmindedly in our day-to-day living, but also delved into how we utilize metaphor to structure, conceptualize, and share our understanding of reality. It might not be obvious what exactly the difference is. The authors argue that metaphor is not just a matter of language, but also a process of internally organizing our understanding of the external world. The first half of the book makes the positive case that our perceptions of reality are built upon metaphors. The second half of the book makes the case that other philosophical views fail to adequately account for such conceptual structuring. In the end, the authors argue that an “experientialist” view of truth and meaning not only account for our metaphorical comprehension of reality, but also retain and unite the most compelling aspects of other schools of thoughts that fail to do so.

The first half of the book is a success. The authors provide many and thorough examples of how our understanding of reality is structured metaphorically and how these metaphorical concepts are organized into coherent systems. They provide an explanation of why some mixed metaphors work and why others appear absurd.

 

• The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century (by Steven Pinker)

The first couple of chapters are pretty good.

 

• Style: Lessons in Clarity and Grace by Joseph M. Williams

The author says “it is good to write clearly, and anyone can.”

Most authors cut weak words when they find them, but some have organized their cutting strategies into useful categories, see below for 5 Principles of Concision from the book:

1. Delete words that mean little or nothing [actually, certain, really, kind of]
2. Delete words that repeat the meaning of other words [various and sundry]
3. Delete words implied by other words [final outcome, each individual, terrible tragedy]
4. Replace a phrase with a word [There is a need for voters to –> voters must, the thing to do before anything else –> first]
5. Change negatives to affirmatives—unless you want to emphasize the negative [not many –> few, not notice –> overlook, not include –> omit]

=====Some books about reading======

• How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading (by Mortimer J. Adler and Charles Van Doren) – wiki page of the book

 

=====Some online materials about writing======

• Everyone Can Write Better (and You Are No Exception) (pdf) by Prof. Herbert H. Clark at Stanford University.

My notes: This is just for basic and fundamental writing skill improvement. For more advanced and subtle skills, we need to reference some books such as those I mentioned above, and practice the skills in our everyday writing (such as emails, tweets, Facebook messages, and blogs) and work related writing (such as course assignments, papers, reports, and proposals). With the time goes, we will improve our writing and (writer-reader) communication skills in our grant proposal and scientific article writing.

• Style for Students by Joe Schall

• Writing Recommendation Letters (A Handbook for Faculty) by Joe Schall 

• Writing Personal Statements (A Handbook for Students Applying for Scholarships and Graduate Study) by Joe Schall 

• Guidelines on writing a research proposal (pdf) by Prof. Matthew McGranaghan at University of Hawaii (Manoa)

My notes: I saw Prof. McGranaghan’s this particular great post about proposal writing when I searched for assistant professor positions. I still remember it very well and clearly even though I read it about one year ago, and thought I would like to share it with you:)

• Concision — Five Strategies for Clear and Direct Communication (pdf)

• Rule of 3: Why Trios Makes Copy Memorable (According to Science) (pdf)

• Good Writing – Marc H. Raibert (Boston Dynamics, Inc.) – (PDF if not retrievable)

• However: 7 Sentence Positions & 2 Uses [by Tanya Trusler on August 27, 2014] (PDF)

It is about the use of ‘however’ and it is quite good. It also provides some guidance on commas and semicolons in the process.

=====Grant writing resources======

• Grant writing resources: Letter of Intent, and Letter of Support etc.

• Goals and Objectives — proposal writing

• Are You Justified? Text Alignment in Your Grant Proposal [PDF]

“Left-aligned text may not seem as crisp or neat as justified text due to the ragged right margin, but it provides a relaxed and inviting look. Most websites use left-aligned text and email is never justified. Unlike justified text, left alignment requires no adjusting of uneven spaces between words because imbalances in line spacing always occur at the end of the line (see “left aligned” example above). Also, the ragged right edge of left-aligned, single-column text can enhance legibility by helping the eye find the start of the next line after leaving the end of the previous line; the eye tends to get lost trying to find the beginning of a new line when both margins are flush. For that reason, left-aligned text may increase the ease and speed of reading. Ragged right margins also add variety and interest to text-heavy documents like grant applications.”

“The bottom line is that, while there is no “right” or “wrong” way to align text in a grant application, our recommendation is  that applicants use left-aligned text as a way to maximize the readability—and thus reviewer friendliness—of their proposal(s).”

• • *** A useful checklist for proposals (PDF) [Why? How? What?]

  a set of ‘rules’ to use in judging whether a proposal is ready to submit (and to be used by reviewers in judging them) .

  Thanks goes to my postdoc supervisor Prof. Alan MacEachren for sharing this with me.

  *** How Long Does It Take to Write a Grant?

  • Part One: How Long Does It Take to Write a Grant? In Praise of Going Slow (by Beth Keithly, PDF)

  

  

  

   

  • Part Two: How Long Does It Take to Write a Grant? The Entire Grant Proposal Development Task List  (by Beth Keithly, PDF)

  This is a long list and it is also why I think you need time to develop your proposal. So without further ado, I give you the list (mostly in order of how it should be done):

  • • • Read solicitation/guidelines
      • Alert your grant specialist to your intent to apply
      • Check out sponsor/program for priorities, funding history, strategic match
      • Identify and contact collaborators, including—if needed—external evaluators
      • Work with collaborators on roles within the project
      • Develop concept paper
      • Communicate with program officer regarding the concept paper
      • Draft abstract
      • Draft narrative/description
      • Draft evaluation plan
      • Draft budget
      • Draft budget justification
      • Draft project timeline
      • Draft facilities section
      • Draft current and pending support
      • Draft references
      • Request, draft, and collect letters of commitment
      • Collect bio sketches from collaborators
      • Do internal paperwork for proposal submission, including conflict of interest, IRB/IACUC, and financial disclosure information
      • Draft/revise your bio sketch
      • Develop figures and tables
      • Review and edit drafts based on solicitation review criteria
      • Identify colleagues to review drafts
      • Send drafts to colleagues for review
      • Review and edit drafts based on colleague feedback
      • Revise drafts based on feedback
      • Send revised drafts to colleagues and Office of Research editors
      • Edit and revise drafts based on reviews
      • Finalize proposal package, including placement of figures, pagination, special characters, fonts, margins, institutional information, and correctly naming files and placing them in correct format
      • Submit complete package to grant specialist

  • about proposal writing

  • Basic components of a proposal (pdf)

   

  • Chris O’Leary’s essays about writing an “elevator pitch”.

  This stuff, especially the list of attributes in the “Elevator pitch 101” page (PDF), is very relevant to writing a good grant proposal.

  • How to write a great research proposal by Simon Peyton Jones (PDF, PPT)

   

• TBA

 

=====Info related to scientific writing======

• Common mistakes in technical writing (This is a living document, but in case it is not accessible, a PDF here)- Wojciech Jarosz (Dartmouth College)

• Conventions of Scientific Authorship (pdf) (By Vijaysree Venkatraman  Apr. 16, 2010)

Kosslyn employs a points system, which is explicated on his lab website. Anyone who works with him on a project that results in a paper can earn up to 1000 points, based on the extent of their contribution to six different phases of the project: idea, design, implementation, conducting the experiment, data analysis, and writing. The first and last phases—idea and writing—get the most weight. Those who make a certain cutoff are granted authorship, and their score determines their order on the list. Those who earn less than 100 points are acknowledged in a footnote. “It’s very, very rare that there’s any sort of issue,” he says.

Stephen Kosslyn’s point system mentioned in the post (pdf).

• TBA